Friday, 18 November 2011

Cerebus Guide To Self-Publishing

Out of print for years, this is the self-publishing guide everyone swears by. Light on technical specifics but heavy on what it really takes to be a successful self-publishing cartoonist, the co-creator of the world's longest graphic novel brings his 30-plus years of experience to a step-by-step guide to what you need to do and what work habits you require to hope for a chance at success in today's ultra-competitive direct market. Updated with new material assessing the pros and cons of the computer revolution that continues to rock the comics publishing world from top to bottom.

DAVE SIM:(from The Blog & Mail, 18 November 2006)
Just to head anyone off at the pass, I can't picture ever doing an Understanding Comics [by Scott McCloud] or a Comics and Sequential Art [by Will Eisner] or a Create Your Own Graphic Novel [by Mike Chinn & Chris McLoughlin] book of my own. I consider those to be just Too Large As Subjects to tackle definitively but I certainly think all three are potentially very helpful to what we are all, presumably, trying to do here. The closest I came was The Guide to Self-Publishing which I will be theoretically revising and republishing somewhere up ahead and that I only tackled because in the course of 1992/93 with the US Tour I had been asked the same questions enough times that I had a clear idea of how to compose a primer that would take care of most of the immediate self-publishing entry-level questions. How I wrote and drew comics myself is, to me, Too Large A Subject for a book. Usually all I can picture is looking at someone else's comic book and critiquing it on the basis of my own creator prejudices and hopefully giving them a different perspective or a helping hand. Sometimes the lettering is the biggest problem, sometimes it's the inking, sometimes it's the layout, so if I can just do some suggestions on tracing paper, sometimes I can help and sometimes I can't. Sometimes the honest answer is: stop looking at my stuff and start looking at Chester Gould or someone who's more stylized. Sometimes they just have to go through a few years of wrong turns before they get there.